"Lord hall dismissed a letter signed by 120 MPs demanding that the BBC stop using the term on the grounds it gives undue credibility to the Islamic extremists, saying the BBC would “redouble our efforts” to use caveats such as “so called Islamic State group”.

PS there was this kid Nigel at school who used to call himself 'Mr Ultra-Boss'. If we called him 'Nigel' he would get his two friends to beat you up. They wore ankle-length drainpipes with 16-hole DMs. If you wore a denim jacket or any kind of fatigues they'd beat you up for that too*

The name "Daesh" is beginning to gain traction. A good thing because apparently the members themselves hate it and it makes them really irritated...

Even the most dictatorial and authoritarian regimes only get to choose what they're called to their faces, they can't control what people say behind their backs.

[invokes Godwin] The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei didn't really appreciate their name being abbreviated to 'Nazi' as it looked and sounded a bit too much like 'Nazi' - which was slang for an awkward, clumsy, backwards peasant. The Nazis didn't call themselves Nazis, but everyone else did. Amusingly the American Nazi Party do call themselves Nazis. But probably do so quite correctly. ( I don't thing Dunning Kuger is a member). [/invokes Godwin]

There are, broadly speaking, four things that people call the group: ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, or Daesh. This is largely ISIS's fault; a big reason the group has so many names is that it keeps changing it.

When the group's predecessor organization was created in 1999, it was called Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which means Unity and Jihad. In 2004, the group's founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pledged an oath to al-Qaeda, changing his group's name to Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn — or, as it was called in English, al-Qaeda in Iraq.

After AQI took over huge swaths of Iraq in 2006, the organization declared itself to be a state in northern Iraq, and started calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq. When it took a bunch of territory in Syria in 2013, it began calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham — ISIS.

Al-Sham is a difficult-to-translate Arabic term referring to a specific geographic area along the eastern Mediterranean that includes Syria. Some English speakers translate al-Sham as "the Levant," which refers to a broader region in the Middle East that generally overlaps with al-Sham. This is how you get ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), as the White House and others call it. Others still approximate al-Sham to Syria, which yields the same ISIS acronym.

The full name in Arabic is transliterated like this: al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham — which produces the acronym DAIISH (usually spelled Daesh in English). That sounds an awful lot like the Arabic word "dahes," which the Guardian translates as "one who sows discord." ISIS kind of hates this insulting connotation, and so banned the name "Daesh" in its territory.

But it doesn't use ISIS either. Crucially, the group now claims to be a caliphate — that is, the successor of the original seventh-century founding Islamic nation. As such, it dropped the geographic identifiers from its name, and simply calls itself "the Islamic State."

konabunny » Why is recognition determinative of whether it's a state or not. Lots of countries don't recognise Israel but it's patently a state.

The UN does, which is the most basic measure. As I wrote, everybody doesn't recognise ISIS, not just some. Of course recognition is a basic requirement, otherwise anybody could go round declaring themselves a state.